Opening stand: Rudraneil Sengupta on the early years of women’s cricket in India
As our team hope to win the sport’s biggest prize, let’s salute the teens and young women who laid the ground for this phase, in a very different world.
The ongoing ICC Women’s World Cup is a great opportunity for the Indian team to emerge champions for the first time. Playing on home ground with partisan support should bring joy and a spark to the players.
It has also been three seasons of the Women’s Premier League, and as that T20 tournament has grown, women’s cricket in India has grown with it, giving young players the opportunity to work and play in elite environments alongside the best players from around the world. Add those players — women such as Richa Ghosh, Kranti Goud and Sneh Rana — to veterans such as Smriti Mandhana, Harmanpreet Kaur and Jemimah Rodrigues, who are among the best in the world, and this team are clear contenders for the title.
Over the past decade, women’s cricket has truly raised itself from a sport struggling to survive (with barely any funding, a dismal lack of games, and a socially unconscionable gender divide where it would be hard to find an Indian boy who has never played cricket, and almost as hard to find a girl who has) to a sport with a large and loyal following, the beginnings of funds and infrastructure befitting its stature, easily recognisable stars, and plenty more playing opportunities from the grassroots all the way to the Premier League.
This change has been well-documented, but what about the early years of women’s cricket in India? It is perhaps revealing that there exist almost no records of the first women’s Test series played here (except for the scorecards).
That Test was played in 1976, when West Indies came touring. For the first three matches, India tried out three different captains: Ujwala Nikam and Sudha Shah, both teens at the time, and Sreerupa Bose, then 25. There are no interviews or anecdotes to be found about any of them; just some cricketing stats.
Yet the Tests were very well-attended. Each of the six matches, held in six different cities, saw stadiums nearly full. When India won the fourth Test (the only result in six games, so that win also decided the series) in Patna, there were crowds lining the road all the way from the stadium to the team hotel. The women players even eventually came out onto their balconies to acknowledge the crowds, such was the joy of that first victory.
Shantha Rangaswamy, who was then 22 and captained the team in Patna, went on to captain India for a few years with distinction, and is one of the few women players of that generation who is remembered and honoured.
One of seven daughters raised by a single mother, Rangaswamy grew up in a joint-family home where the courtyard’s main purpose was to serve as a cricket ground. “There were no men in the family, and my mother would say to us, ‘You will have to stand for yourself’,” she once told journalist (and HT columnist) Sharda Ugra in an interview.
In those early years, and unfortunately for many years afterwards, the cricketers did everything themselves. Rangaswamy went on fundraising campaigns, pushed administrators to organise matches, oversaw the procurement of cricketing gear, haggled for practice space, negotiated for jobs for her teammates, booked train tickets, and more.
There are so many wonderful stories waiting to be told about India’s pioneering women players. As our current team hope to win the sport’s biggest prize and begin a new era for women’s cricket in the country, let’s take a minute to salute the young women who laid the ground for this phase, in a very different world, all those years ago.
(To reach Rudraneil Sengupta with feedback, email rudraneil@gmail.com. The views expressed are personal)
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